CARIBBEAN MERIDIANS

CONFERENCE ABSTRACTS (A-Z BY SURNAME)*

Camille Alexander ‘No Lines of Demarcation: Caribbean and American Literary Representations of Child Sexual Assault’ The term ‘meridian’, when discussing the Caribbean, poses a debate between perception and reality. The Caribbean is perceived as an earthly paradise by northern visitors, where they can enjoy sun, sand, sea, and sex without consequences. However, global north assumptions about the global south often ignore the reality of social issues impacting both regions; one of the most pressing is child sexual assault (CSA). This paper seeks to draw a connection between global north and south, specifically the US and Caribbean, through an examination of literature addressing CSA. Using Stacey-Ann Chin’s The True History of Paradise, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Amanda Smyth’s Lime Tree Can’t Bear Orange, and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, this paper attempts to unravel the limited perception of global south as paradise and, therefore, impervious to CSA. In addition, this paper hopes to place more emphasis on female victims, who, when children of color, are often cast as the initiators and/or perpetrators of their own sexual violations rather than as the victims of sexual predators. Finally, this paper strives to situate the global south in a discussion of resolution through acknowledging that CSA occurs in both regions; engaging in an open dialogue; and decriminalizing the process of victims seeking justice while moving the legal system towards holding perpetrators accountable.

Camille S. Alexander completed a PhD at the University of Kent, Canterbury and is an assistant professor of English at the United Arab Emirates University. [email protected]

Bénédicte André and Srilata Ravi ‘Multiple Temporalities and Cultural Translation in Yanick Lahens’s La Folie était venue avec la pluie Looking at Yanick Lahens’s 2006 short-story, La Folie était venue avec la pluie, this paper seeks to introduce the notion of transreading, or reading as a form of translation between temporalities within and between texts. Quoting French poet René Char in a 2001 interview, Yanick Lahens raises the sense of a temporal distance experienced by Haitian writers “in a hurry to write, as if [they] were lagging behind […] inexpressible life” (Char, 1936). Lahens contents that in Haiti where, more than anywhere else, it feels like everything is being simultaneously built and unbuilt (construit et défait), the short story as a genre can offer another way of grasping and making sense of the particularity of this temporality.

Bénédicte André is a Lecturer in French and Francophone Studies at Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia). Her research interests lie in the literary and cultural productions of French- speaking islands, in particular those of Reunion, New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Her recent publications include Iléité. Perspective littéraires sur le vécu insulaire (Pétra, 2016); “Island

* Where papers are co-presented the presenters are listed together under the surname which comes earliest in the alphabet.

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Literature and the Literary Gaze” (Routledge, 2018); “‘Il y a toujours l’Autre’. Towards a Photomosaic Reading of Otherness in Island Short Story Collections” (AJFS, 2018). [email protected]

Srilata Ravi is Professor of French and Francophone Literature at the Faculté Saint-Jean of the University of Alberta. She taught at the University of Western Australia (2004-2010) and the National University of Singapore (1994-2003) before joining the University of Alberta in 2010. Her research interests are in Francophone Postcolonial Studies, Diaspora Studies and Indian Ocean Studies. Her recent publications include Translating the Postcolonial in Multilingual Contexts (with Judith Misrahi-Barak, 2017); Sports, modernité et réseaux impériaux: Napoléon Lajoie, Kumar Shri Ranjitsinhji, baseball et cricket au tournant du XXe siècle (with Claude Couture, 2017); Rethinking Global Mauritius: Critical Essays on Mauritian Literatures and Cultures (2013); Ecritures mauriciennes au féminin : penser l'altérité (with Véronique Bragard 2011). [email protected]

Nancy Bird-Soto ‘Luisa Capetillo and the Coordinates for a Global Feminism’ Luisa Capetillo (1879-1922) is a Puerto Rican writer-activist from the early twentieth century, considered by her primary biographer, Norma Valle, to be a pioneer Puerto Rican feminist. Her varied influences, ranging from anarchism to Spiritism, make her a figure that navigated the realities of proscription, without wavering in her commitment to women’s and workers’ rights. In the last three decades, Capetillo has been analyzed through several lenses. These are, mainly: Puerto Rican feminism, Latina working-class activism in the United States, sociocultural relegation, and the anecdotal significance of her being the first woman to wear pants in public in Puerto Rico. Drawing from this trajectory, my presentation considers Capetillo as both proponent and embodiment of a brand of global feminism in which the local and the global find balance and its enactment through the words and actions of the activist. Thus, Capetillo emerges as a Caribbean subject – as Lara Walker notes – with a transnational vision. For Valle, Capetillo’s work is internationalist while bound to an essential Puerto Ricaneess. My analysis explores the coordinates of Capetillo’s global feminism as a transnational and label-defying subject, i.e. as a Caribbean agent. I incorporate the work of Valle, Walker, Lisa Sánchez-González, among other critics.

Nancy Bird-Soto is Associate Professor of Spanish at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her book, Dissident Spirits: The Post-Insular Imprint in Puerto Rican/Diasporic Literature, is a forthcoming title in the Peter Lang Humanities Series. [email protected]

Patrick Brennan ‘Carnival and Performance Art in the novels of Earl Lovelace’ Caribbean art forms including Carnival, Calypso and dance feature as recurring themes throughout Earl Lovelace’s novels, where they are presented for their historic and contemporary socio-political significance. They are identified within this presentation as representing foundational elements, for what Lovelace describes as, “the soul of a new Trinidadian aesthetic”. Beginning with the enslaved African’s appropriation of Carnival from its French origins in the early 18th century, through to its centrality as a “meeting place for racial reconciliation and cultural creativity”, Carnival and associated art forms have assumed an enhanced sociological value with Lovelace, as he came to believe in their potential to offer the base on which an authentic Caribbean history could be

2 established. While Carnival had traditionally exemplified a mode of political resistance for the Afro- Trinidadian community, its contemporary engagement with the disparate ethnic and racial groups provides the basis for employing nation-building practices. Lovelace promotes Carnival’s ability to articulate the psychic emotions of all the participants, allowing for a common purpose in constructing a sense of unity and oneness in building a popular socially cohesive culture, where all Trinidadians “may confidently engage with modernity”.

Patrick Brennan University of Wollongong. Ph.D. candidate. Proposed dissertation focusing on the Trinidadian Theatre Workshop. [email protected]

Soizic Brohan ‘Pathways to Political Assemblies for Caribbean Women: A Comparative Study between Guadeloupe and Jamaica’ While the abolition of slavery in Guadeloupe and Jamaica compelled the French and British colonial oligarchies respectively to abandon their political hegemony in these territories, women remained disenfranchised until 1944. Having been largely underrepresented in political assemblies throughout the 20th century, women have recently become better represented in these democracies. This is due to the implementation of political parity in Guadeloupe and strong advocacy for gender quotas in Jamaica. This presentation focuses on the political trajectories of women elected to office in these territories and how their existing social capital has enabled them to access political assemblies. The intended analysis uses a diversified approach, both quantitative: through the construction of a database of female politicians; and qualitative: through biographic research interviews conducted with a number of them. Drawing from data collected from research field trips to Guadeloupe in 2015 and Jamaica in 2016, four distinct pathways emerge for women entering political life which are shared by both territories. These women can be described as: “heirs” to past politicians; “activists” in the political and social spheres; “technocrats” who convert professional competencies to political capital; and “free spirits” who already have a public identity before seeking office.

Soizic Brohan, PhD candidate in Political Science, Les Afriques dans le Monde (LAM), Sciences Po Bordeaux, founding member and secretary of the Association Francophone des Études Caribéennes. [email protected]

Jarrett H. Brown ‘Mama’s Man and the Matrix of Masculinity in Two of Louise Bennett’s Poems’ Several of Louise Bennett-Coverley’s poems employ the mother in a variety of ways, to influence the regime of masculinity as well as its virile statements about the power and role of men in communities. In these instances, Miss Lou feminizes masculinity by dramatizing the performance of her male characters around the dominant, authoritative and virile figure of their mothers. In this manner, she undoes the hypermasculine and phallic Jamaican man not just to call potential of his own masculinity in question but also to reiterate the meridian status and stature of the mother whom he must celebrate, affirm, and submit. I am interested in this othering of masculinity, specifically where it becomes unhinged or suspended in the process when the man calls into being, consciously or unconsciously, the feminine subjectivity of his mother, hence identifying himself as mama’s man. I examine, what I call, states of manly distress in two of Louise Bennett Coverly’s poems, “Uriah

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Preach” and “Street Boy” in order to demonstrate how masculinity, as a set of values, almost always recuperates the feminine in order to prove and disprove manliness.

Dr. Jarrett H. Brown is currently an Assistant Professor in English at Howard University where he teaches courses on Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Culture. [email protected]

Lawrence Brown ‘The Global Making of the West Indian Immigrant: An Intellectual History’ The Windrush moment of mass migration between the British Caribbean and Britain was for many contemporaries an unexpected and surprising event. Post-war researchers and policy-makers sought to map and analyse the new social category of “West Indian immigrant” through a range of global frames – from the African-American ghetto to African colonies to European refugees. Charting the intellectual field that developed in response to Caribbean migration, this paper examines the networks and mentalities that connected the emerging academic disciplines of the social sciences in the post-colonial Caribbean to the wider world. It also explores why some of the deeper social forces that shaped Caribbean mobilities such as colour and class, extended family networks and intra-regional connections were so rarely recognised in the metropolitan visions of the “West Indian immigrant”.

Laurence Brown is Director of the Australian National Internships Program at ANU. He has taught and published on migration history at the University of the West Indies (Cave Hill Campus), the American University of Paris and the University of Manchester. He is currently working on the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act and a global history of indentured migration. [email protected]

Sienna Brown ‘On the Trail of the Caribbean Slaves Transported to the Colony of NSW’ Cassandra Pybus’ seminal work Black Founders: The nknown story of Australia's first black settlers (2006) provided insight into the lives of African American slaves, transported to Australian shores including those like John Randall, John Martin and Caesar who arrived on the First Fleet in 1788. This paper identifies the lesser-known connection between the Caribbean and Australia through the transportation of over 200 West Indian convicts to the Colony of NSW and Van Diemen’s Land, starting in 1797 and as recorded on the convict database held at Hyde Park Barracks, Sydney. Through an extensive period of research I was able to get a sense of who these men were and what happened to them when they arrived here. Some were slaves who had fought in the Baptist War of 1831-32, while others got transported for lesser crimes like stealing a handkerchief, fish, timber, a horse, a cow, silver and house breaking. According to their Ticket of Leaves, their under sentence experiences took them to places like Liverpool Plains, Port Macquarie, Maitland, Mudgee, Brisbane Waters, Goulburn, Clarence River Valley, Murrurundi and even Melbourne.

Sienna Brown was born in Kingston, Jamaica and grew up in Canada before migrating to Sydney, Australia. While working at Sydney Living Museums, she came across the convict indent of William Buchanan, a Jamaican slave transported in 1836 and was struck with a sense of fate – a lost man far from home – resonating with her own feelings of displacement. A film editor and documentary

4 director by trade, Sienna’s forthcoming book Master Of My Fate, to be published by Penguin Random House in April 2019, is a historical fiction novel based on William’s life story. [email protected]

Trevor Burnard ‘Tacky’s Revolt, Jamaica, and its Legacies, 1756-96’ Abstract: Tacky’s revolt in 1760-61 was the most important slave revolt in the eighteenth century Caribbean prior to the Haitian Revolution. It caused a fundamental shock to the Jamaican plantation system and to the white elite which governed the island. It was also an event that occurred during the Seven Years’ War. It altered, in transformative ways, social and political life in Jamaica for at least two generations, including a new emphasis on increasing forms of coercion over enslaved people. Unlike the Haitian Revolution, slave rebels were unsuccessful in overturning white rule. The lesson from the revolt in white planters in French and British America was that slave revolts could be overcome if whites were unified, relentless in their ferocity and able to harness the support of Maroons and British troops to keep slaves cowed. Tacky’s revolt and its suppression established a distinctive pattern of socio-political rule in Jamaica for a generation until this understanding of white supremacy and coercive policies was placed under threat by the Haitian Revolution and the second Maroon War in the 1790s.

Trevor Burnard is Professor of History and Head of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. He is the author of five monographs and numerous articles and edited works on Caribbean history. His principal publications are Mastery, Tyranny, and Desire: Thomas Thistlewood and His Slaves in the Anglo-Jamaican World (2004); Planters, Merchants, and Slaves: Plantation Societies in British America, 1650-1820 (2015) and (with John Garrigus) The Plantation Machine: Atlantic Capitalism in French Saint Domingue and British Jamaica (2016). He has a collection of essays on Jamaica in the age of the American Revolution under review with the University of Pennsylvania Press, due for publication in 2019. He is the editor-in-chief of the Oxford Bibliographies Online In Atlantic History. [email protected]

Kit Candlin ‘Migrants and Refugees in the Southern Caribbean in the Age of Revolution’ This paper highlights the differences in labour status given to various groups in the Atlantic region and argues that the word ‘refugee’ was repeatedly used to make these descriptive distinctions. This paper looks at the way an African-American bid for freedom affected the development of empire. My research emphasises the confusions inherent in the ending of the slave trade as the British empire developed at the end of the eighteenth century. By examining migration we can see the increasingly exclusionary nature of the British Empire and its territorial space, as well as the changes brought about by decades of instability.

Kit Candin is a lecturer in the School of Humanities at the University of Newcastle. His interests range broadly from all aspects of American History, especially colonial America, to European empires and the history of violence and war. In addition he has in-depth knowledge of the Atlantic World from the fifteenth century to the nineteenth. Currently Kit is working on a project to explore the transference of regimes of violence from the wider Atlantic to the American colonies in the lead up to the American War of Independence. His publications include The Last Caribbean Frontier

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1795- 1815 and Enterprising Women: Race, Gender and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic 1770- 1830. [email protected]

Anne Collett ‘“the SING ing still”: Kamau Brathwaite’s Defence of the Epic Little more than a week after Hurricane Gilbert made historic landfall on Jamaica in September 1988, Kamau Brathwaite officially opened the Centre for the Study of Epic Poetry at Harvard University. Here he read a poem in progress: ‘SHAR Hurricane Poem’. The poem was created out of chaos – written at the heart of lived maelstrom; recited at the heart of reflective scholarship. It is as though the still centre of the hurricane were displaced – from Caribbean island to North American continent, from Third to First worlds. What are these worlds to each other? (to misquote My Fair Lady, ‘In Harvard hurricanes hardly ever happen’) What does hurricane mean and how can it mean when it is displaced from origin? Brathwaite sings at the opening of ‘Epicentre’ in Harvard raw from very immediate and very personal trauma. He too was distant at the time of the hurricane’s impact – helpless. Brathwaite introduces the poem with this reflection on the personal nature of the event:

‘As soon as I saw that storm come up out of the sea just south of Puerto Rico, I knew this was it…this was the horror and there was nothing nothing nothing nothing nothing I could do about it… All I could do was watch that approaching terror without its sound on television and not reach anybody…And as far as I could see, nothing was being done to help that house that heart that home…Who cares about Irish Town? what after all is “Irish Town”…?’

And yet “SHAR Hurricane Poem” sings – it sings the song of death and darkness and the song of morning light. The song traverses time – past, present and future. The song includes generations of peoples across the earth, life across the planet. The song shifts from the tremble of a lone voice to a powerful chorus of epic:

song . song . song

syllable of circle . pellable of liquid contralto

tonnelle of your tone into fire

Can poetic word create lines of connection between the Caribbean and those ‘other worlds’ whose still centres might seem so far removed from raging winds, mud slide, broken homes, broken lives. Of course ‘might’ is the pivotal word here as the impact of climate change is felt in Atlantic hurricane seasons of greater frequency, greater reach, greater force, greater impact. Perhaps song is our last defence – it is “the SING ing still”.

Anne Collett is an Associate Professor in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong. She edited Kunapipi: Journal of Postcolonial Writing & Culture from 1999-2012 (issues from 1979-2012 are available at https://ro.uow.edu.au/kunapipi/ ) and has written extensively on 20th century postcolonial poetry. Recent publications include Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather (edited with R McDougall & S Thomas, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), Postcolonial Past & Present (edited with L Dale, Rodopi/Brill, 2018), Romantic Climates (edited with O Murphy, Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and 100 Atmospheres (multi co-authored, Open Humanities Press, 2019). [email protected]

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Justine Collins ‘The Influence of the 1661 Barbados Comprehensive Slave Code throughout the English Atlantic World’ Colonial slavery contained three interrelated aspects of law that transformed with the introduction of African slavery. Firstly, defining slaves as property, secondly, establishing forms of control over slaves, and thirdly, developing legal definitions of race, which distinguishes African slaves and their descendants from the rest of the population. The Barbados Assembly was the first colony, which successfully created legislation attempting to cover the three aspects. English property law was the scaffolding that upheld these innovated provisions. The slave regime and the laws that sustained it connected the disparate colonies of the Atlantic world and provided the justification for the coerced migrations of millions. These stolen migrants became the colossal unfree populations that perpetuated the development and success of the plantation economies of the Americas.

This presentation begins with Barbados, as the progenitor of slave law codification. It then follows the trajectory of the code’s influence from other West Indian islands to the mainland colonies within North America. Furthermore, the influence and transplantation which occurred throughout the English slave holding Atlantic are examined at large, revealing intricate interwoven connections and knock- on effects which started even before the genesis of colonial slavery.

Justine Collins is a PhD Candidate at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt. Research project is on the transplantation of slave laws in the British Caribbean. [email protected]

Raphael Daello ‘Harlem, Moscow and the Birth of Caribbean Nationalism’

The rise of national identity and nationalist literature in the Anglophone Caribbean during the 1920s and 1930s is usually read in relation to British Empire. The Beacon group in Port of Spain and the Drumblair group in Kingston are seen as two of the dynamic intellectual spaces where a modern, nationalist Caribbean literature and politics took form alongside the labor uprisings of the period. In the spirit of drawing connections to other worlds and other meridians, I want to offer another, transnational site: the Communist International, particularly as it connected Harlem and Moscow, and sprawling out to Germany, France, London, and back into the Caribbean. The pivot for this black internationalism, I will argue, was Haiti.

Scholarship frequently takes into account how emergent West Indian nationalism turned to Haiti as a representative of an epic revolutionary past and “authentically” black culture. But from 1915 to 1934, Haiti was occupied by U.S. marines. Beginning in the 1920s, Communists in the U.S. – many of whom were from the West Indies – led the opposition to the occupation of Haiti. The African Blood Brotherhood, led by Nevis-born Cyril Briggs, used the role of Wall Street banks in Haiti’s occupation to refine and popularize the Communist critique of imperialism and finance capital. George Padmore, W.A. Domingo, and other later participants in Caribbean anticolonialism during the 1930s and 1940s were directly influenced by these critiques, while creative writers such as Claude McKay and Eric Walrond developed their own literary voices in relation to activism against the occupation of Haiti. This presentation will point to what we gain from reading West Indian

7 cultural and political history in connection to these sometimes far-flung routes through which Haiti travelled.

Raphael Dalleo, professor of English at Bucknell University, is author of American Imperialism’s Undead: The U.S. Occupation of Haiti and the Rise of Caribbean Anticolonialism (University of Virginia Press, 2016), which won the 2017 Caribbean Studies Association award for best book about the Caribbean. His other books include Caribbean Literature and the Public Sphere (University of Virginia, 2011) and The Latino/a Canon and the Emergence of Post-Sixties Literature (coauthored with Elena Machado Sáez, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and edited collections Haiti and the Americas (University Press of Mississippi, 2013), and Bourdieu and Postcolonial Studies (Liverpool University Press, 2016). [email protected]

Andrea Davis ‘Memory, History and the Trope of the Sea’ This paper explores the interconnections in the diasporic histories of Caribbean people of African and Indian descent—the two largest racialized groups in the Anglophone Caribbean – as an examination of Caribbean women’s multiple crossings. The paper draws on M. NourbeSe Philip’s collection of poems Zong! (2008) and Michelle Wright’s critique of a “Middle Passage epistemology” (2015) to theorize Caribbean women’s invocation of the sea as a crossroads of memory where they might ask different questions about their past and possible futures. The trope of the sea allows us to think about African and Indo-Caribbean people’s multiple crossings beyond the exigencies of the nation – as a mode of recursive / repeating journeys and connections linking the traumatic memories of the Middle Passage to those of the kala pani. The paper, therefore, argues that the trope of the sea by allowing us to theorize diasporic mobility beyond the geographic and political limits of the land as rooted nation, while simultaneously registering the “local situatedness” of Caribbean diasporic experiences within their “particular historicity” (Neumann and Rupp 2016, 474), repositions the Caribbean in an important symbolic and spiritual relationship with the past that makes explicit the intersecting flows and crosscurrents in Caribbean women’s past and diasporic futures.

Dr. Andrea A. Davis is Chair and Associate Professor in the Department of Humanities at York University in Toronto. Her research focuses on the literary productions of Black women in the Americas and her work encourages an intertextual cross-cultural dialogue about Black women's experiences in diaspora. [email protected]

Ben Etherington ‘Creole Meridians: Creolisation in Alexis Wright and Patrick Chamoiseau’ This paper will take the opportunity of the coming together of Alexis Wright and Patrick Chamoiseau at this conference to explore resonances between their fiction. I take as my starting point the notion of creolisation – a term closely associated Chamoiseau’s work and abundant in the critical discussion of it, but one which rarely has been used to discuss Wright’s work and which is largely absent from the critical lexicon of Australian literary studies. I want to ask 1) whether it is helpful use the term creolisation in critical discussions of Wright’s work and 2) whether processes of creolisation in her work have a comparable cultural logic to that found in Chamoiseau’s. Without pre-empting the answers to those questions, my hope is to illuminate the ways in which practices of creolisation help

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each author to create literary habitats. The connections between such practices, I posit, do not gain substance from direct contact (say, a creole ‘network’ with ‘nodal’ points), but might be thought of as ‘meridians’ which pass through quite disparate literary practices that share, nevertheless, an intention to strengthen and deepen cultural particularities.

Ben Etherington is Senior Lecturer in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a member of the Writing and Society Research Centre at Western Sydney University. His publications include Literary Primitivism (Stanford, 2018), the Cambridge Companion to World Literature (2018, co-edited with Jarad Zimbler), and Unsettled Poetics: Contemporary Australian and South African Poetry (special issue of Wasafiri magazine). His current project is a history of creole verse in the Anglophone Caribbean from slavery to decolonisation. [email protected]

Norman Etherington ‘The Posthumous Triumph of Governor Eyre’ In the aftermath of the uprising at Morant Bay, Jamaica in 1865 Governor Edward John Eyre attempted to justify the extreme violence of his response by collecting a large dossier of papers from supporters and likeminded people – all tending to show a concerted island-wide conspiracy to overthrow British rule and drive all the white and mixed race population into the sea.

The Royal Commission convened to investigate the Morant Bay affray and its aftermath dismissed Eyre’s dossier as worthless and concluded there had been no predetermined plan for revolution. For most of the next century writers on Jamaican history agreed. For a variety of reasons opinion began to shift in the mid-twentieth century. Reevaluation of Eyre and Morant Bay caused people to revisit testimony collected by the Royal Commission. including Eyre's tainted dossier. As the Royal Commission’s published volumes stood as virtually the only primary source, questionable evidence presented by the governor came to be treated as of equal value to other testimony.

This paper explores the reasons for revisionist interpretations of Morant Bay and the use made of Eyre’s self-justifying volume of evidence.

Norman Etherington is Emeritus Professor of British Imperial and Commonwealth History at the University of Western Australia. His recent books include Missions and Empire, Mapping Colonial Conquest and Imperium of the Soul: the Political and Aesthetic Imagination of Edwardian Imperialists. [email protected]

Kate Fagan ‘Archives of the Present: Ancestral Responsibilities and Stories of Relation in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and Natalie Harkin’s Dirty Words’ Abstract TBC

Dr Kate Fagan is a Senior Lecturer in Literary Studies within the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a member of the WSU Writing and Society Research Centre. Her current research interests include contemporary poetry and poetic theory; Australian poetry and literature; experimental poetics and narratologies; and critical theorisation of links between poetic form and ontology. She is also an internationally recognised poet and songwriter whose third collection of poetry First Light (Giramondo, 2012) was short-listed for both the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards

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and The Age Book of the Year Award. Her album Diamond Wheel won the National Film and Sound Archive Award for Folk Recording. [email protected]

Maxime Forriez and Jérôme Verny ‘A Measure of the Connections Between the Caribbean Island Territories and the World as a Whole’ Our proposal is a geographical study. Globalisation has been changing world organisation for the last three decades. The Caribbean Islands are not an exception. These territories show that the import and export flows of goods evolved between 1995 and 2014. The impact of globalisation is very impressive, but this impact is not so obvious in the Caribbean Islands because their economies have many problems in their relations with continental states: a low coverage rate, a catastrophic commercial balance, and so on. Despite all that, the nature of their connections has actually transformed. To demonstrate this, the issue can be summed up in two questions. (1) Which countries exchange with the Caribbean island territories? We will explain a significant evolution: they have new partners. (2) How is the exchange of commodities organized?

Maxime Forriez (born in 1983) has a Ph. D. in geography, and more specifically in theoretical geography. For two years, he has studied island logistics in MOBIS. He has constituted an enormous database for this purpose. Several cases are currently being planned, one of which are the Caribbean Islands. [email protected]

Jérôme Verny (born in 1980) has a Ph. D. in geography, and more specifically in economic geography. He was the founder and has been the director of MOBIS laboratory since 2009 at NEOMA Business School (France, Rouen) which studies supply chain and transport. [email protected]

Gareth Griffiths ‘Tracing a Recovered Heritage? Joseph Jackson Fuller: A West Indian Missionary in the Cameroons’ This paper reflects material in mission archives relating to the complex relations between West Indian born missionaries, their African congregations and the white mission authorities. It is also part of the broader story of the relations between the West Indies, West Africa and European colonial power in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is increasingly clear that material that may have been released in specific disciplinary areas such as mission studies has a broader application. The story of Fuller is an example of how this can lead to the neglect of significant figures and the implications of their positions for broader ways of developing the narrative of these trans-Atlantic black meridians. The paper draws on the unpublished autobiographical notes of Fuller and letters in the mission archives. Some of this material has been covered in specialist materials by the paper- giver but my intention here is to try as far as a short paper can do to place this material in a broader interdisciplinary context in the hope that this will encourage more work on neglected figures such as Fuller here and elsewhere in the colonial world.

Emeritus Professor of Literature at UWS. Griffiths has just completed editing a book with Philip Mead on “The Social Role of Narrative: Human Rights and the Cultural Imaginary” that Ibidem and Columbia U.P. will release in 2017. I am beginning work on a similar edited book on Narrative and

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Mental Health Issues. I am also continuing work on the impact of the South African poet, novelist and critic Stephen Gray. [email protected]

Michael Griffiths ‘Forcènement de la mémoire: Glissant, Memory, Poetry’ In Poétique de la Relation, when Glissant speaks of the importance for Caribbean writers of the avoidance of a reception as “exotic appendices to the body of French, English, or Spanish literature”, he turns to elaborate what his poetics of relation would introduce to stave off this supplementary logic of reception. He insists that the literatures of the Caribbean need to assert “with the force of a tradition that they enter suddenly, with the force of a tradition that they have forged themselves in the relation of cultures”. The “motor of this obscure design” will be, Glissant says, the “forcènement de la mémoire” which “decides with the imaginary, our soul manner of taming time”. I leave the phrase “forcènement de la mémoire” untranslated, because its active sense of an enfrenzied search after memory, the motor force of the poetics of relation and its forging of novelty and sovereignty in the relation of cultures, is, I admit, difficult to translate. However Wing’s clear evocation of Rimbaud’s phrase, “the derangement (dérèglement) of the senses”) in her translation: “the derangement of memory” warrants alteration. Not only is forcènement not dérèglement, but also and further, the very topos of the passage in which Glissant speaks of his forcènement de la mémoire is violated by an attempt to relate its logic to the influence of an Occidental poet. At precisely the moment when Glissant majestically invokes the mode by which relation is, through a frenzied and active memory, to elaborate a novel forging of new poetic ideas from the relation between cultures, his text is reduced to a mere “appendix” of Rimbaud’s own making. This paper seeks to read the frenzied sense of memory implicit in the original phrase as an anchor point to unravel Glissant’s unique poetics.

Michael Griffiths’s work has focused on settler colonial studies and in particular, Australia. He has also written about Caribbean writing, publishing articles on Derek Walcott and Edouard Glissant. His first book was published this year, titled The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (UWAP, 2018). [email protected]

Kathleen Gyssels ‘Heterotopias Up and Down the Meridian: The Convict as Anti-Hero, from Patrick Chamoiseau to Leon Damas and the Schwarz-Barts’ Australia and the Antilles were both designed to serve as 'convict camps'. Nonetheless, their postcolonial literature ignores the figure of the convict whilst acknowledging other 'marginals' and ’pariahs’ of their respective societies. In the case of the Antilles, a new wave of thanatourism has refocused attention on the French Guyanese deportation camps and inspired renowned literary figures like Patrick Chamoiseau. But others before him have dealt with the concentration universe in the tropics. Léon Damas, author of anthologies (Latitudes, 1947), took an obsessive interest in the institutions Europe created up and down the Meridian to isolate and imprison 'criminals'. The prisoners in 'Green Hell' loom large in his poetry, notably in Black-Label and Mine de riens, a posthumous collection published in 2012.

Although the maroon (fugitive slave) is considered the only authentic 'hero' of French Caribbean literature (Glissant 1981), I propose to demonstrate the existence of another 'dark hero', the

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“bagnard” or the “relégué”, the convict. Totally invisible in Caribbean fiction at first glance, his shadow may be detected in Damas’s Retour de Guyane (1938) and his early poetry (Pigments, 1937). The novels of Maryse Condé and Simone and André Schwarz-Bart, moreover, interrogate the heterotopias of the Caribbean hinterland. Creating “knots of memory” (Rothberg 2010), those authors from the French-speaking Caribbean have dealt with the prison camps of Cayenne and the Isles de Salut and have made them resonate with other concentration universes in the Old World and Latin America.

Kathleen Gyssels is Professor of Caribbean literatures and Black and Jewish Diaspora Studies at the University of Antwerp, Belgium. She has published widely on the Antilles and Haiti, and questions of formation of the canon and forgotten figures. Her last two books are Marrane et marronne: la co-écriture d’André et de Simone Schwarz-Bart (2014) and Black-Label ou les déboires de Léon Damas (2016). [email protected]

Trevienne Harris ‘Making Waves: Sonic Interventions in Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings’ In this paper I argue that sound deployed in Caribbean historical fiction is a quarrel with History directly challenging Eurocentric notions of linear time and historiography that tends to subordinate localized relationships to time, history, and place.

Reading Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, I consider how the novel’s form reflects the extent to which reggae music influenced a counter-cultural literary movement that advances specific critiques of history. As such, the novel’s “syncopated form” imitates a fractured hi/story it attempts to re/assemble. Further, the fragmented time, voices, and stories echoes the syncopated rhythm of reggae music in keeping with what Kwame Dawes theorizes as a “reggae aesthetic”. Still, the political and critical implications of citing sound as an aesthetic and political practice in Caribbean fiction is not simply invested in writing that counters dominant historical narratives; it calls readers to participate in aural witnessing and a communal experience of histories.

Additionally, I suggest that rumors, gossip, and hearsay, which might be considered figurative uses of sound as orality and sound as voice in the novel, are decidedly antihistoriographical methods that James employs to the same critical and creative end: to make waves by troubling our perceptions of time, Truth, and History.

Treviene Harris is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research is at the intersection of Caribbean studies, historical fiction, and sound studies and considers the form, function, and representation of sound in C21 Caribbean historical fiction. [email protected]

Anne Hickling-Hudson ‘Musical Meridians: Socio-cultural Themes in Jamaica’s Experience of European Classical Music’ This paper is a memoir about the meridians – global interconnections – involved in the Jamaican experience of European classical music. My memoir considers the musical environment in which I grew up in Jamaica of the 1950s and 60s. From this hub, I trace meridians that explore my mother’s career, her musical training in England, and how she and a few of her friends and colleagues returned to Jamaica as music teachers in the 1930s and 40s to establish music studios

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that lasted for over 60 years, training generations of young Jamaicans. These Jamaican music studios annually hosted British music examiners employed by the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music to examine students in their performance of the prescribed syllabus. The world of European music was one aspect of Caribbean immersion in European education. Yet, there was postcolonial pushback in that a few brilliant Caribbean students emerged from classical musical training into innovative careers integrating Caribbean music into composition, performing, theatre, dance and music education. Another postcolonial meridian is the Caribbean influence on the work of musicians from other Commonwealth countries. The musical meridians of my memoir illustrate several aspects of Caribbean socio-cultural history including those of careers, social class, education, colonial influence, postcolonial assertion, and cultural hybridity.

Dr. Anne Hickling-Hudson, a retired professor of Education now in an adjunct capacity at QUT (Queensland University of Technology), is committed to researching education for postcolonial change and development in the Caribbean. [email protected]

Barry Higman Caribbean Contributions to the Establishment of Longitude Meridians – lines of longitude – share just one thing, the time of day. The need for a precise system became critical only in the context of the hazards of long-distance navigation. But because there was no simple astronomical solution to the establishment of longitude, in contrast to the relative ease of determining latitude, measurement proved more complex. Even when the problem of measurement was solved, dispute persisted over the placement of the Prime Meridian, the precise point on the ground where time begins.

Caribbean locations were never proposed for the Prime Meridian, but the region did provide sites for important events in the extended search for means of establishing longitude. These began with Columbus observing an eclipse of the moon when marooned on Jamaica’s north coast, and his claim that he had in fact found a very different place, much further west. Further attempts were made in the seventeenth century, paralleling the growing importance of the West Indies in the mercantilist economy of the British Empire. When in the eighteenth century an efficient solution to the problem was finally found, using reliable clocks, it was to Jamaica and Barbados that the instruments were taken for field testing.

Barry Higman is Emeritus Professor of the Australian National University and of the University of the West Indies. He has published primarily on Jamaican history. [email protected]

Brian Hudson ‘Falmouth, Jamaica: Architecture, Empire and Cruise Ship Tourism’ Situated on the north coast of Jamaica, Falmouth was founded in 1769, becoming the capital of the parish of Trelawny created in 1770. It developed as an important port which thrived on the expanding sugar industry and flourishing slave trade. Falmouth declined commercially after the abolition of slavery in the British Empire, becoming a relatively neglected settlement on a coast which later attracted considerable tourism development elsewhere. Falmouth’s retarded growth had the effect of retaining much of the Georgian architectural character of the town that eventually conservationists sought to preserve. Heritage tourism was suggested as a means of achieving this

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in a way that contributed to the local economy and boosted employment. A perceived opportunity to realise this arose with a proposal by a United States based company to develop the port of Falmouth to accommodate some of the world’s largest cruise ships. This controversial scheme was carried out by the Jamaican Government in partnership with Royal Caribbean Cruises Ltd., a global cruise company based in Miami, Florida. Cruise ships began arriving in 2011. An examination of Falmouth’s architectural heritage reveals some of the global connections that have influenced the town’s development.

Dr. Brian Hudson is a geographer and urban and regional planner who worked in England, Ghana, Hong Kong, Jamaica and Grenada before moving to Australia in 1985. He is now a Visiting Fellow at QUT, Brisbane. [email protected]

Michele A. Johnson ‘“…to uphold the highest standard of West Indian womanhood”: The West Indian Domestic Scheme in Canada’ Based on centuries of plantation model economies dependent on the labour of enslaved Africans/descendants and indentured workers, by the twentieth century, British colonies in the Caribbean were largely moribund due to socio-economic and political malaise, chronic unemployment and persistent poverty. After World War II, attempting to address these problems, the Jamaican colonial government approached the Canadian authorities to launch a labour recruitment scheme to place some of the island’s women as domestic servants in Canadian households. Starting in 1955, the West Indian Domestic Scheme became the main means of Caribbean migration to Canada and a major source of connections and remittances. In their anxiety to ensure its success, regional authorities published the Advice to West Indian Women Recruited for Work in Canada as Household Helps, outlining the conditions of employment and urging the recruited women “to uphold the highest standard of West Indian womanhood.” This paper examines the Scheme as part of Caribbean labour migration history, and deconstructs the attitudes and expectations contained in the Advice within the socio-cultural context of Canada, where the intersections of race, gender and “origins” ascribed place/status to the women (and their families), who bore the blame for “blackening” supposedly pristine white Canadian spaces.

Johnson is a Professor of History at York University: her teaching and research interests focus on gender relations, race/racialization, labour, domestic slavery/service in Jamaica and Canada. [email protected]

Jacqui Katona ‘Aboriginal Epistemology and the Existence of a Community-centred Approach to Abuses of Power in Australia’ Abstract: TBC

Bio: TBC

Contact: [email protected]

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Nicolas Lemay-Hébert ‘Living in the Yellow Zone: The Political Geography of Intervention in Haiti’ Every international intervention comes with its own security regulations, which contribute in turn to structure the political geography of the intervention, delimiting areas of interaction between interveners and local population and shaping the political economy of intervention. The securitization of the everyday in Haiti took the form of colour-coded security zones (green, yellow and red), with distinct security regulations for each. This article will analyse the specific everyday ramifications of the security mapping in Haiti, focusing particularly on the vast yellow zone that covers residential areas in Port-au-Prince and the downtown area in dire need of investment after the earthquake. Based on interviews conducted in Port-au-Prince in 2017 and 2018, the article will make three distinct arguments, underscoring the ramifications of mapping as a spatial practice of securitization. First, by channelling expatriates to specific locations in the capital, and by preventing them from occupying other zones in Port-au-Prince, the securitization practices contribute to the gentrification process around the Pétion-Ville area, contributing in their own way to the deep-rooted social segregation process in play in Port-au-Prince. Second, it will analyse how these logics of securitization are linked to an ‘imagined geography’ of the capital, where actual security risks matter less than logics of disassociation from areas perceived as having no interest for international actors. Finally, the article will look at how security mapping is reappropriated and resisted by local actors, displaying a mix of resilience and self-help strategies. This article makes a distinct contribution by linking critical cartography and international relations, especially the color-coding and security mapping discussion with the securitization and intervention literatures.

Nicholas Lemay-Hébert is a Senior Lecturer, International Development Department, University of Birmingham (UK); Fellow, Australian National University (starting January 2019). Member of the Scientific Committee, Francophone Association of Caribbean Studies (2018-2022). [email protected]

Jianjun Li ‘Ralph de Boissiere in China in the 1950s and 60s’ It is really remarkable for any writer to have three works in Chinese translation in the 1950s and 60s.The collection of the National Library of China indicates that three of Ralph de Boissiere's works were translated and published, Crown Jewels in 1958, Calypso Isle in 1960 and Rum and Coco- Cola in 1964. The Chinese translation of Crown Jewels is based on the Paul List Verlag Leipzig edition in 1956, and the other two works Calypso Isle and Rum and Coco-Cola are based on Boissiere’s typescripts. This paper will focus on the translation, publication and reception of R. D Boissiere 's works in China and explain why his works received special attention in the first two decades of the People’s Republic of China.

Mr Jianjun Li is a senior lecturer, director of the Australian Studies Centre at Beijing Foreign Studies University (2013- ) and secretary-general of the Chinese Association for Australian Studies (2014- ). Currently he is a PhD candidate at Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre, researching on Australian literature in Chinese translation in the 1950s and 60s. [email protected]

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Antonia MacDonald ‘Now I show you an open secret: A Reading of Derek Walcott’s White Egrets’ White Egrets, Walcott’s final collection of poems, has been often read as self eulogizing. In this presentation, however, I am arguing that if White Egrets can be read thus, then it is because of Walcott’s ongoing anxiety to influence how he would be remembered in the future. At the age of eighteen, in a colonial space where black subjectivity has yet to exist, where there were few Caribbean literary forbearers, Walcott was bold enough to decree himself a publishable poet. Seeing his craft as a continuation of his father’s avocation, he was inspired to define self as poet, as artist. Finding literary forefathers in western literary models he believed that, through art, he would write himself into being. In his time, poet, dramatist, literary critic, and journalist, Derek Walcott remained constantly plagued by the question, “Have I succeeded in shaping a regional or international literary imagination? Now at the age of eighty, he questions aloud whether his poetic gift has withered and if so, then what ? who is he? I read White Egrets’ “the bleached regrets / of an old man’s memoirs” (46) as his opening up to his reader, to the world, those profound anxieties about his literary significance. I am suggesting in this paper that it is only from the vantage point of old age, that Walcott was able to relax his guard and admit to these insecurities in a way that he had not permitted himself to do in his earlier life.

Antonia MacDonald is a Professor in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences in the School of Arts and Sciences, St. George’s University, Grenada. Prof. MacDonald writes on contemporary Caribbean women writers, St. Lucian literature and Eastern Caribbean popular culture. She has published articles in Anthurium, Journal of West Indian Literature (JWIL), Callaloo and MaComere and is the author of Making Homes in the West/Indies (Garland, 2002) and editor of the collection, The Fiction of Garth St. Omer: A Casebook (2018). [email protected]

Russell McDougall ‘The City Life of Redonda, a Caribbean Kingdom in Exile’ Most people find micronations (i.e. invented nations, lacking “official” international recognition) hard to take seriously; and in truth they are often intentionally ludic. Yet with the exception of those that exist purely as virtual entities, most micronations are territorial; they hypothesise entirely new physical spaces. This makes them particularly interesting, not only from a political point of view but also from the cartographic perspective of literature as a set of spatially symbolic strategies and procedures. The Island of Redonda lies in the Leeward Islands and belongs officially to Antigua and Barbuda. The Kingdom of Redonda has of necessity therefore been performed in exile and has relied heavily on the literary arts of its successive kings. But the city life of micronational narrative is, for literary scholars, completely unexplored terrain.

In this paper I will focus on the city life of the Kingdom of Redonda through the reign of its literary kings:

• King Felipe (M.P. Shiel, born in Montserrat, decadent author of horror, fantasy and future- fiction); • King Juan I (British neo-Georgian poet, John Gawsworth); • King Juan II (British author and founder of Centaur Press, Jon Wynne-Tyson);

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• King Xavier (Spanish novelist and founder of the publishing house, Reino de Redonda, Javier Marias).

Russell McDougall is Professor of English at the University of New England, NSW. His most recent book co-edited with Anne Collett and Sue Thomas is Tracking the Literature of Tropical Weather (Palgrave, 2017). [email protected]

Jennifer McLaren ‘The Evil Tendency of the Measure: Legacies of the Caribbean in Richard Madden’s Western Australian Sojourn,1848-9’ In 1848, Richard Madden, an Irish Catholic medical doctor, author and influential abolitionist arrived in Western Australia to take up the post of Colonial Secretary. He brought with him a career’s worth of administrative experience, spanning Jamaica, Cuba, and the Gambia. This paper will trace Madden’s experiences in Jamaica to reveal the fraught tensions within Jamaican society on the eve of Emancipation, and on a personal level, the contradictions inherent in Madden’s role as an imperial agent. Madden’s second posting in the Caribbean was as the “Superintendent of Liberated Africans” in Havana. During that time he published a two-volume work, A Twelvemonth’s Residence in the West Indies, in which he reflected upon his time in Jamaica. The paper will conclude by considering the extent to which Madden’s Jamaican experiences influenced his work in Western Australia, and question whether in Madden’s actions, we can detect the legacy of British slave- ownership – and anti-slavery – in the Australian colony.

Jennifer McLaren has recently completed a PhD at Macquarie University. Her thesis, ‘Irish Lives in the British Caribbean: Engaging with Empire, 1770-1835,’ utilised the biographies of ten Irish sojourners to address the question of the Irish experience of empire. [email protected]

Elizabeth McMahon ‘The First and the Last of the New Worlds: The Caribbean and Australia’ The title of this paper comes from Paul Sharrad’s description of the relationship between the Caribbean and Australia in view of the sequence of their discovery and colonisation by Europe, which locates them as bookends of European imperial expansion (Sharrad 1993, 58). Columbus (it is believed) first landed on Guanahani Island, home of the Lucayan people, which he renamed San Salvador, in 1492, and which he thought was one of the 7449 islands of the Sea of Cin, Japan and Cathay (Clay 1992, 617). Cook landed in Ka-may, home of the Eora Nation, which he renamed Botany Bay, on continental Australia in 1770 – nearly three hundred years later in a very different world and on a very different topology.

This paper identifies profound connections between the Caribbean and Australia as mapped by colonialism in the genealogy of globalisation. Specifically, I will examine the first novel published in Australia, Quintus Servinton (1830), in which the West Indies are presented as a kind of alternate world for Australian colonial subjects. The paper will show how the 'first and the last of the new worlds' are mapped both by their historical sequence and as co-temporal parallels.

Dr Elizabeth McMahon is an Associate Professor in the School of the Arts and Media. Her research interests are in Australian literature, Island Studies and Gender studies. Her recent monograph, Islands, Identity and the Literary Imagination (New York and London: Anthem, 2016) won the 2017

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Walter McRae Russell Award for the best work of literary criticism on an Australian subject and the inaugural (2017) Australian University Heads of English Prize for Literary Scholarship. Since 2008 she has co-edited Southerly, Australian oldest literary journal and co-edits a book series titled Rethinking the Island for Rowman and Littlefield International. [email protected]

Arhea V. Marshall ‘Reading Calypso Lyrics, Exploring Space and Time (In)dependence’ This paper investigates a selection of calypsos performed at the 1962 Independence Calypso competition in Trinidad focussing on their references to space and time in reference to political Independence and cultural independence. In my analysis calypso performances are identified as an musical and oral artform but more importantly as competing and complementary historical archives and the lyrics as literary memory practice. Beginning the juxtaposition with lines from the first and second place calypsos there are divergent spatial and temporal narratives between Lord Brynner’s “this is your land, just as well as my land...democratically, educationally, we’ll be independent” and Mighty Sparrow’s “Trinidad and Tobago will always live on, Colonialism gone, our Nation is born”. In these few lines, we see the emergence of land ownership, the need to become independent politically and systematically/institutionally, the desire of longue durée for the independent nation, beginning a new national narrative and a dependence on a shift time but not space as relevant themes. There has been a focus in Postcolonial Studies on the longue durée of colonialism but little has been said about how this longevity flows over into the independence period.

Arhea V. Marshall, born and raised in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, obtained her Bachelor of Arts in German Studies and Environmental studies at Bowdoin College in 2015 and is currently completing her Masters of Arts degree at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen in English Literatures and Cultures, with research interests in: the Global South and the Caribbean, gastropoetics, archives and collective memory/memorialization/ celebration looking at the entanglements of nature and culture. [email protected]

Peter Minter ‘Green Errancies: Decolonial Ecotypes in Australian Nature Poetry’ This paper will describe a new genealogical trace in Australian poetry and Australian ecopoetics: modes of Glissantian errance that emerge beyond the edges of stock representations of Australian nature. Glissant writes that “in the poetics of Relation, one who is errant (who is no longer traveler, discoverer, or conqueror) strives to know the totality of the world yet already knows he will never accomplish this – and knows that is precisely where the threatened beauty of the world resides.” There are Australian poems that seek to abandon received, often monocultural, universalising visions of nature, and which instead embrace kinds of formal and aesthetic movement and multiplicity to produce errant, at times creole ecopoetic ecotypes against the background of the general milieu. Such poems suggest how “green errancy” might contribute to broader thinking about a poetics of decolonised relation in Australian ecopoetics, and about our responsibilities to the “threatened beauty” of Country and poetry itself.

Peter Minter is a leading Australian poet, poetry editor and writer on poetry and poetics. His books include Empty Texas and blue grass, and his poetry has been widely published and translated. He

18 was a founding editor of Cordite and co-edited the anthologies Calyx: 30 Contemporary Australian Poets and the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature. He is a senior lecturer in English at the University of Sydney, where he teaches contemporary poetry, ecopoetics, creative writing and Indigenous studies. [email protected]

Dashiell Moore ‘A Politics of a Poetics in Édouard Glissant’s Poetics of Relation’ The theoretical writing of Martinique writer, Édouard Glissant have been increasingly influential in the last decades after the renewed circulation of his French writings in English following translations by Michael J. Dash, Natalie Stephens, and Betsy Wing. Specifically I will read the intersections of poetics and politics in Glissant's work, Poetics of Relation, which has productively been read as an un-practical divergence from his earlier work Caribbean Discourse (1981). As Peter Hallward scathingly wrote: "This is one of the most stridently enthusiastic fictional incantations of a borderless world ever written” (2001, 102). I will suggest in this paper that the poetics of Glissant's writing can be more efficiently interpreted as a social ethos bridging the fields of ontology, post-colonial thought, and literary study, and if we speculate as to the results we might be able to find if we perceive this ethos as a practical methodology for encountering – we conceive of Glissant’s work as an ethics in motion. What I hope to then do is to offer a potentially ‘practical’ reading of these unpractical later works, and to reflect upon the necessities of a world turn in post-colonial writing.

Dashiell Moore is a English PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. His thesis project is entitled “The Redirected Poetic Encounter”, which leverages a legacy of Imperial literature informing the encounters of ‘First Contact’, before offering new terms of encountering in Caribbean and Indigenous Australian literary works. [email protected]

Pearl Nunn ‘Visible and Vocal: Free Caribbean Women in Eighteenth Century London’ This paper will focus on how Caribbean women of colour fitted into their local communities and the early black British community in London during the Eighteenth Century. Establishing their social class, marital status and family relationships are all essential elements in piecing together the way in which black women became a part of their local urban landscapes. Was there a Caribbean community in London? How integrated were black women with white women? Were these women of colour assimilated with people of the same class? Did they maintain their transnational identities? This group navigated a unique space in the Eighteenth Century world, being of minority race, subservient gender and in many cases, also being only one step away from plantation slavery. Yet the themes of agency, mobility and independence still emerge strongly from the perspectives of Caribbean women in the historical archive.

Pearl Nunn is a History PhD candidate, research assistant and sessional academic at the University of Newcastle, NSW. Pearl’s PhD focuses on the history of women of colour in eighteenth century Britain. [email protected]

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Su Ping ‘Chinese Caribbean Women, Identity and Diaspora in Jan Lowe Shinebourne’s The Last Ship’ Jan Lowe Shinebourne, who previously published as Jan Shinebourne, is a Chinese Caribbean writer born and raised in Guyana. Her first two novels Timepiece (1986) and The Last English Plantation (1988) focus on the Indo-Guyanese experience. Her third book, a collection of short stories entitled The God-Mother and Other Stories (2004) suddenly acknowledge her Chinese heritage, both by using her full name, Jan Lowe Shinebourne, on the cover and by writing about Chinese Caribbean experience. Since then, she has been foregrounding “the Chinese” in her writing. Her latest novel The Last ship (2015) tells the story of three generations of women in a Chinese Caribbean family. This paper, therefore, will explore the diasporic experience and identity- searching journey of the three generations of Chinese Caribbean women in the novel.

Su Ping is an associate professor in the School of International Studies at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. She has a PhD degree in English literature from the University of Hong Kong. Her research interests include Caribbean literature, cultural studies and visual arts. [email protected]

Tzarina T. Prater ‘The Children of Dragons and Shopkeepers: National and Genealogical (Un)Certainties’ “The Children of Dragons and Shopkeepers: National and Genealogical (Un)Certainties" places autobiographical narratives by Paula Williams Madison, Sherwin Tony Chong, and Hannah Lowe in conversation with the historical functions of the official Chinese family register, the “huji,” which can be traced back to 2100 BCE – 1600 BCE, its shifting discursive meaning over time, and the contemporary diasporic Chinese family album. I want to explore the tensions between autobiographical texts, which emphasize individual searches for belonging, and extraordinary texts like Ray Chen’s The Shopkeepers: Commemorating 150 years of the Chinese in Jamaica 1854- 2004and Descendants of the Dragon: The Chinese in Trinidad 1806-2006, which engage a cartographic impulse as part of their elaborate expressions of diasporic Chinese genealogy while articulating collective desires for belonging, kinship, citizenship, and community.

Tzarina T. Prater is an associate professor of English at Bentley University in the Department of English and Media Studies and her current project, Labrish and Mooncakes: Chinese Jamaican Cultural Production and Nationalism, explores the literary and cultural production of diasporic Chinese in the Caribbean. [email protected]

Leighan Renaud ‘Connecting Women through Water in Nalo Hopkinson’s The Salt Roads’ The Salt Roads (2003) by Nalo Hopkinson tells the stories of three women living in different centuries and locations, who become connected to each other through the travelling consciousness of the Haitian goddess Ezili. Nancy Kang argues that Hopkinson’s novel portrays women of the African diaspora with strength, and that “this implied power of black women often relates back to the matrifocal spirituality rooted in continental or New World African diasporic experience”. I am interested in the way Hopkinson represents the connections between the women and Ezili in her trans-spatial matrifocal community. One such way that Hopkinson connects her diasporic, trans-

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spatial community is through images of salt and water. The fluidity in the way diaspora has been defined, and the fact that the global African diaspora is most easily mapped by using oceans, means that water is an ideal metaphor regarding diasporic communities. I argue that, by representing black and mixed race women in France, Haiti, and Egypt, Hopkinson’s novel strongly suggests that matrifocality is not only a Caribbean phenomenon (as has been previously argued), but a cultural behaviour that can be traced across the African diaspora, and Hopkinson’s uses water imagery to encourage readers to consider the connections between black women globally.

Leighan Renaud is a PhD candidate at the University of Leicester. Her thesis is entitled “Representations of Matrifocality in Contemporary Anglophone Caribbean Fiction”. [email protected]

Consuelo Martiniez Reyes ‘The Lesbian Nation Abroad in Contemporary Hispanic Caribbean Literature’ This talk considers contemporary narrative works from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic, and how they suggest lesbianism in the islands is transformed through exile. Writers such as Rosa Silverio, Sonia Rivera Valdés, and Magali García Ramis, among others, portray female homosexual characters who eventually decide to leave their country of origin due to social oppression toward LGBTQ people. I propose that it is the experience of sexile (Guzmán) itself which allows these émigrés to find in the USA a replica of their nation that would accept them as they are. Nevertheless, this replica is only metaphorically constituted; it is a nation that exists via praxis, as it comes into being through homosexuality. These characters are able to find their lost homeland reflected in a fellow countrywoman. Sexual attraction toward a person of the same sex is no longer a threat to the fatherland but rather serves as a means to recreate a new nation away from home. More so, I propose these relationships are justified within the heteronormative, national discourse by the way in which they create a new, perverse “nationality”. Nationalist sentiment is not shown through one’s integration into the (heterosexual) status quo, but rather found in the same-sexed body.

Dr Consuelo Martínez Reyes is Lecturer in Spanish and Latin American Studies in the International Studies Department at Macquarie University. [email protected]

Kim Robinson-Walcott ‘Violence, Vengeance and Valour: Dudus, Viv and Vybz’ Since independence, Jamaica has grappled with the socio-political legacies of colonialism in forging a new national path. Meanwhile, violence continues to grow exponentially, corruption is entrenched, and definitions of right versus wrong are highly subjective. The figure of the anti-hero or outlaw in Jamaican culture has long been prominent – from 18th-century rebel leaders such as Three-finger Jack to today’s born-fi-dead nihilistic shottas and drug dons.

This paper will explore the published writings on some of Jamaica’s dons which seemingly seek to legitimise their activities: for example, Duane Blake’s 2003 biography of his father Vivian Blake, leader of the notorious Shower Posse; and K.C. Samuels’s 2011 book on Tivoli don and international drug kingpin Dudus, “Jamaica’s First President”. Both texts fascinatingly demonstrate the transnational scope of the dons’ activities, as well as their suggested respectability. Meanwhile,

21 the outlaw figure, from rude bwoy to rebel to ranking, has always been reflected in Jamaican popular music; and of particular interest to this paper is the infamous gangster DJ Vybz Kartel’s 2012 Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto in which he positions himself as a Malcolm X-type radical leader and social activist; while his often inflammatory and anarchic (and ever-popular) lyrics again assert that in the frontier society of Jamaica, new paradigms of order/disorder, of morality/immorality/amorality, of right/wrong, prevail.

Kim Robinson-Walcott, PhD, is editor/head of Caribbean Quarterly, University of the West Indies, Mona. She is also the editor of Jamaica Journal, published by the Institute of Jamaica. Her publications include the scholarly work Out of Order! Anthony Winkler and White West Indian Writing (UWI Press, 2006), Jamaican Art (Kingston Publishers, 1989, 2011) which she co-authored, The How to Be Jamaican Handbook (Jamrite Publications, 1988) which she co-authored and illustrated, and the children's books Dale's Mango Tree (Kingston Publishers, 1992) and Pat the Cat (LMH Publishing, forthcoming), which she also illustrated. A short story collection is forthcoming. [email protected]

Rodrigo Escribano Roca ‘“No he conocido más cielo que el de Cuba”. Coloniality, Gender and Race in the Caribbean Fictions of Gerturdis Gómez de Avellaneda (1851-1869) The literary works of Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda (1814-1873), the Cuban writer that spent her adult life in the cultural circles of Madrid, have been studied from the point of view of literary theory. However, there is much to know about the impact of her “peripheral” representations in the imaginaries of Spanish imperialism. The paper will study how her novels constructed fictional worlds whose referential point were the societies of the Caribbean and whose main intention was to operate a symbolical opposition to the rhetoric of Hispanism, colonialism and slavery. Against the manly, Eurocentric and metropolitan representations of the imperial worlds that hegemonized Spanish public opinion, the novels of Gertrudis constructed an alternative geographical and philosophical view-point, which vindicated the political agency and the moral emancipation of the subaltern subjects of the Spanish Empire: the slave, the woman and the indigenous people. She, who was systematically excluded from the cultural institutions of liberal intellectualism, inversed the traditional “othering” of the subaltern subject, identifying her readers with the view of the colonized and dominated. By deploying the aesthetic freedom of the romantic historical novel, she successfully socialized among the Spanish readers a counter-narrative to the historiographical discourses of the colonial and pro-slavery elites, such as the state-funded works of Martín Fernández de Navarrete, José Ferrer de Couto or her own friend, Ramón de la Sagra. The paper will center its analysis in her works Sab, Guatimozín and El Cacique de Turmequé and in the influence that they had in Spanish culture of that time. We defend that the fictions of Gómez de Avellaneda supposed the irruption of “other worlds” in the conscience of the Spanish publics of her time. Her Caribbean view was a very important contribution for the development of the political philosophies that sustained the projects of anti-slavery, Christian cosmopolitism, feminine emancipation and colonial reform.

Rodrigo Escribano Roca is researcher, teacher assistant and PhD student at the University Research Institute of Latin American Studies (IELAT), University of Alcalá, and in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts of Western Sydney University. He has been Visiting Graduate Student in the Center of Iberian and Latin American Studies. He has been awarded “Scholarship for

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university staff training” (FPU) by the Ministry Education and Culture of Spain . His PhD research, “Histories of the Old Empire. The Americas in the historical thought of Spain and Great Britain (1830-1898)” studies comparatively the representations of the Americas in the historical cultures of Spain and Great Britain during the “Victorian” or “liberal” age. [email protected]

Christopher de Shield ‘“Analogous Structures”: Comparing Southeast Asian and Caribbean Texts’ While culturally and geographically distinct, Maritime Southeast Asia and the Caribbean share much more than the banal fact of archipelagicity. However, their geographical and cultural distance seems to preclude any justification for their explicit comparison. This paper offers justification for this comparative project – first, by considering contemporary theory problematising comparison, and second, by selectively reviewing historical instances of the two archipelagos’ comprehension – suggesting that the two regions were thought about analogously in the colonial era. With this historical grounding and theoretical problematisation, the paper makes the claim that colonialism provided a convergence both ideologically and materially with respect to these two particular regions and that they began to be thought of in the same context, but also, and partially as a result of this comprehension, they began to be actively and physically ordered and altered so that physical changes in both environments rendered them more and more similar to one another. Paralleling this development is a particular usage of the term, Indies, which, although now obsolete, once referred to both regions simultaneously in an allusive manner. This historical and theoretical grounding thus allows for placing the cultural products of the two regions into productive relation.

An Australian-born Belizean citizen, Christopher De Shield, Ph.D. (Malaya) teaches in the department of languages and literature as assistant professor of English at the University of Belize. [email protected]

Karina Smith ‘Mapping a Topography and Counter-topography Through Popular Theatre: Sistren Theatre Collective’s Feminist Activism’ This paper draws on Cindi Katz’s concept of mapping topographies and counter-topographies to analyse Sistren Theatre Collective’s transnational feminist activism. It analyses the creative process behind and the performance of two of the group’s plays: Domestick (1982) and A Tribute to Gloria Who Overcame Death (1983). I will argue that each of the plays uses the material conditions for people living in urban and rural Jamaica; the way in which race, class and gender inequalities are perpetuated across generations; and the impact of colonialism, global capitalism and neoliberalism on their lives; to confront middle-class Jamaicans with the reality of poverty from the perspective of those who live in it and to trace the contour lines, to use Katz’s concept, between Jamaica and other places where similar oppressions were/are occurring.

Karina Smith teaches Literary and Gender studies at Victoria University in Melbourne, Australia. She has published on Sistren Theatre Collective in many internationally refereed journals and edited books. [email protected]

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Louise Smith ‘Sea Horizon’

and realised

leading now. here

it was in my head this line a/cross eye/s crossing the wash blue sky

Through poetry, critical theory and reflective essay, Sea Horizon engages with the author’s poetic practice as a writer of Jamaican heritage who resides in Melbourne but whose poems are either located in, or re-imagine the geographies of, Jamaica, England and Newcastle, Australia. Investigating the confluence of migrations in the author’s own maternal family – from Kingston, Jamaica, to London, England, to Newcastle, Australia – the author’s poetic practice interrogates memory and forgetting, place and landscape to explore familial and diasporic identities; mapping the movements of the transnational migrant by focusing on notions of place, space, un/belonging and the meaning of ‘home’. These ideas are developed further in the author’s current project Texas, a thematically-linked collection of poems set in the author’s hometown of Newcastle during the Depression. One of the speakers within this collection of poems is Clarence ‘Black’ Harris, who was an alleged shanghaier believed to have been born in Jamaica. The poems attempt to give a voice back to Harris in response to the stereotyping and mythologising of him that became urban folklore during the period.

Lou Smith is a poet and independent researcher based in Melbourne. Her first collection of poetry riversalt was published by Cerberus / Flying Island Books in 2015. [email protected]

Morgan Southwick ‘African-Caribbeans and the Abolition of the Danish Slave Trade: 1933-1803’ Denmark had gradually acquired the West Indian Islands of St. Thomas, St. John and St. Croix, during the mid-seventeenth. Their acquisition was part of the Kingdom’s ambitions to establish a colony that would produce lucrative goods such as sugar, coffee, and cotton. The workforce came to consist almost entirely on enslaved labour imported by Danish ships from Africa. My research pertains to the role of African-Caribbeans, both free and enslaved, in the abolition of the Danish slave trade.

A number of historians have been interested in why the small Danish Kingdom was the first nation to decide to abolish the slave trade in 1792. Explanations have varied from the morality of the Danes, the economics of the island, to the influence of anti-slavery campaigns in places like England. These approaches are certainly relevant to explaining the abolition. However, they ignore that the African-Caribbeans played a role in the event. Through the use of primary materials in Danish, German and English, my work sheds new light on how the African-Caribbeans themselves

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helped shape Danish attitudes towards slavery through various modes of adaption and resistance. I, thus, argue that African-Caribbeans played a key role in the abolition of the Danish trade.

Morgan Southwick is a current Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sydney where I did my BA with honours in history. Visiting Fellow at Harvard University 2018. Masters from the University of Oxford in 2016. [email protected]

Dr. Maria Stratford ‘Rastas’ Journey Home: Travelling the Meridian from the Caribbean to Africa’ “Repatriation is a Must!” was the cry of the Rastafari in Jamaica who identify as African and have longed to return to the country of their ancestors. Over the past six decades hundreds of Rastafari from a variety of Caribbean islands have ‘repatriated’ to Africa, especially to Ethiopia, but many have not stayed. The acceptance of the Rasta community in Ethiopia by the local people has been at times welcoming and at times antagonistic. The legal status of the Rasta repatriates has been precarious for over 60 years however, in recent months there has been an official recognition of this community by the Ethiopian government in the form of permanent residency status. One of the positive outcomes of this is that the children born of Rastafari in Ethiopia are no longer considered stateless. This recognition is of huge significance; now the Rastafari are being acknowledged as part of the Ethiopian nation. The act of repatriation to Africa and the acknowledgement by the Ethiopian nation serves to close the loop on connections between the stolen generations of Africans during the trans-Atlantic meridian and the Caribbean repatriates. This presentation will include an excerpt of my documentary on the Rastafari repatriates in Ethiopia.

Dr Maria Stratford is a lecturer at RMIT University who lived in Jamaica during the 1970s. She is also a documentary filmmaker, photographer and radio presenter and producer. [email protected]

Emily Taylor ‘Global Intertexts: Caribbean Writers and Postcolonial Networks’ In the June 2018 fiction issue of The New Yorker, a feature piece on Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie mentions she read Derek Walcott, the Nobel prize winning poet from St. Lucia, when she wanted to reset her mind: “It didn’t matter which poem – she just wanted to hear his voice” (54). Adichie, herself the source of intertextual reference for her definitions of feminism in Beyoncé’s “Flawless,” cites Walcott as an important influence if not intertext. In this paper, I would like to examine how the Anglophone Caribbean literary canon is a source of influence and intertext for contemporary postcolonial writers outside of the region, and conversely, how writers from outside the region speak to Caribbean writers. This examination of intertextual reference helps us to trace how Caribbean writers form a part of a postcolonial, global network. With a focus on contemporary writing, I hope to provide a sketch of how these global conversations are playing out in 21st century literary texts.

Emily Taylor is associate professor of World Literature at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina. She earned her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Oregon and has published essays in Caribbean-Irish Connections, The Journal of West Indian Literature, The Routledge Companion to Anglophone Caribbean Literature, and Southern Quarterly. [email protected]

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Bonnie Thomas ‘Traversing Time, Space and Genre: Dany Laferrière’s Autoportrait de Paris avec chat’ Haitian writer Dany Laferrière’s latest publication, Autoportrait de Paris avec chat (2018), is a daring departure from his previous works. Always keen to break down any limiting categories, Laferrière set himself the challenge of writing and illustrating a ‘livre dessiné’ (loosely translated as a graphic or ‘drawn’ novel), in which he meditates on different aspects of his literary, cultural and personal trajectory from the geographical standpoint of Paris. Paris has particular resonance for Laferrière at this stage in his life as he was inducted into the prestigious Académie Française in 2015, becoming only the second black person after Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first Haitian and the first Canadian to assume the title of immortel. His physical presence in Paris forms an important part of this role. Laferrière takes the history-laden French capital as the starting point for a sweeping reappraisal of time, space and genre that provide exciting insights into our complex and increasingly globalized world. Far from being a glorified picture book where Laferrière is followed around by a curious, red wine-drinking cat, Autoportrait de Paris avec chat provides a truly innovative approach to past, present and future.

Bonnie Thomas is an Associate Professor in French Studies at the University of Western Australia where she specializes in contemporary francophone Caribbean literature. She has published widely in this area and her most recent publication is Connecting Histories: Francophone Caribbean Writers Interrogating Their Past (University of Mississippi Press, 2017). [email protected]

Sue Thomas ‘Hurricanes in Eighteenth-century West Indian Poetry’ Nancy Stepan has outlined the Enlightenment systematisation of ideas of the tropics, formerly the “‘equinoctial’ or ‘torrid’ zone”. “[T]he ‘tropical’”, she elaborates, “signified a place of radical otherness to the temperate world ... Descriptions and pictures of the tropics … contributed to the formation of European identity, as distinct from that of the tropical zone”. Felix Driver and Luciana Martins note that tropicality has been “compared with … Orientalism, to the extent that both have conventionally been used to define and legitimize essential differences between cultures and natures, both understood in strongly spatial terms”. As destructive tropical and sub-tropical weather events, hurricanes have figured in discourses of tropicality and in contestations of them. In the Caribbean they have famously underpinned calls for a revolutionary poetics more attuned to the distinctiveness of regional experience. Kamau Brathwaite, for instance, has argued that “the pentameter … carries with it a certain kind of experience, which is not the experience of a hurricane. … And that’s the problem: how do you get a rhythm which approximates the natural experience, the environmental experience”. In this paper, drawn from a larger historical project, I address the ways in which eighteenth-century Caribbean poets negotiated Enlightenment and emerging Romantic discourses of tropicality and air.

Sue Thomas is Emeritus Professor of English at La Trobe University, Melbourne. She is currently completing a new book on Jean Rhys’s Literary Imagination. [email protected]

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Charly Verstraet ‘From mondialisation to mondialité: The Caribbean Shore in the World’ Sensitive to sea level rise caused by global warming, the Caribbean coastline is also a site that accumulates trash from around the world. In his Washed Up series, Mexican Multimedia artist Alejandro Duran exposes the marine debris that has washed onto the shore of Sian Ka'an, a Mexican biosphere reserve along the Caribbean Sea, listed as an UNESCO world heritage site. With his team, Duran collects debris, gathers the objects and arranges them by color for his photo series. Beyond the artistic intent, Washed Up traces the trash's original site of production. So far, Duran and his team "have documented products that were made in fifty-eight different countries and territories" (Duran). This paper focuses on Duran's process of transformation of the damage- oriented debris to an aesthetics of global awareness. Duran's photographs present the complex dynamic of a place between local and global frames, a dynamic conceptualized by Glissant with his notions of mondialisation and mondialité. When mondialisation threatens and erases, mondialité enriches and preserves. I argue that there is a call for mondialité in Duran's work around the coastline, the assemblage of an aesthetics, opposite mondialisation, a "colonization by consumerism” (Duran, 2015).

Charly Verstraet is a PhD student in the department of French & Italian at Emory University. He is currently finishing his dissertation on the representations of the Caribbean shoreline. [email protected]

Renee Wright ‘Linking the Poker Challenges Model to China’s foreign policy approach in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM)’ During the colonial period, serving as an economic outpost for Europe, the economic and political realities of states in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) were linked to their colonial rulers. Later, with the decolonisation era and the attainment of political independence, the political ideologies of these states were once again underpinned, this time, by those of the United States. Since the past decade, the geopolitics of the region has led to the emergence of China, where the East-Asian state is aggressively courting regional powers in the Community. Through the analysis of the poker game literature, the article evaluates whether there is a poker-faced power dimension to China’s approach in fulfilling its purposes in the Caribbean Community. Though most researchers cite China’s soft power approach towards states in the regions of Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; there is little said on China’s ‘hidden agenda’ as it relates to CARICOM states that recognise China. Linking the Poker Challenges Model to the China-CARICOM matter, the article concludes that elements used in the game of Poker can also be found in China’s foreign policy approach towards these CARICOM states. This dimension of the approach is termed here as the “poker-faced” power approach.

Renee Wright is a Jamaican 3rd year Ph.D. Candidate in the School of Global, Urban and Social Studies (GUSS) at RMIT University. Her current research looks at the implications of China’s foreign policy on the Caribbean Community from the Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago Perspective (2011- 2016). [email protected]

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